


Words on your skin

by Arwen88



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 16:23:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19360498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arwen88/pseuds/Arwen88
Summary: It was a thrilling thought, to be able to see if there was somebody for him out there, what they felt worthy of being shared, to have the chance to see what kind of person they were even before meeting them.





	Words on your skin

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! First time posting something in this fandom, hope you'll like it.  
> Thank you so much to ThrillingDetectiveTales for beta reading this <3  
> Written for the #giugnobaleno challenge of LDF, prompt 1: Discover

Every year Lewis' parents would throw a party for him for his birthday, mostly because they needed the social events to show off their wealth to their peers. Lewis hated those occasions with a passion, but he still went - partly because they expected him to, partly to enjoy the alcohol that he could drink with the excuse of his own birthday.  
On his seventeenth birthday though, Lewis barely made an appearance at his party, sneaking away long before midnight. For once he didn't care about the girls trying to approach him or even snatching something new to taste without his parents grumbling about it.  
He knew his father would snap at him later for deserting their guests, but he didn't care, sneaking back to his room to shuffle off his clothes and lay in bed wearing only his underwear.  
Everybody knew that the day after your seventeenth birthday you would finally be able to see whatever your soulmate wrote on their skin, so Lewis thought the guests could very well understand, even if his parents surely wouldn't. They weren’t soulmates and always turned their noses up at people who said they were waiting to meet their own.  
Maybe Lewis was a romantic at heart, even if he would have never admitted so.  
It was a thrilling thought, to be able to see if there was somebody for him out there, what they felt worthy of being shared, to have the chance to see what kind of person they were even before meeting them.  
He had taken care to leave at least one little message on his skin every day of his life, holding on to the hope of finding someone that would care about him. Not for his name or for his father's money like the people still buzzing a floor under him.  
He just wanted somebody who would have wanted him in their life, by their side, somebody who would care about his thoughts and what he had to say.

He took a pen and wrote a small "finally seventeen" on the inside of his forearm and then he laid on his bed, worrying his lip with his teeth and waiting for midnight to strike.  
"Happy birthday" appeared right under the words he wrote as soon as his watch struck one minute of the new day. Lewis had never been so happy to see those two words and he grinned openly, grabbing the pen to talk more to his soulmate.  
Now that he could see the other's writings he wanted to know everything possible about them. He knew that names would not appear on the other's skin, and scientists had proven years before that not even addresses or names of common places would appear, the words smudged beyond recognition if one insisted on writing them down. The same could be said about genders or detailed descriptions of oneself. Nobody was really sure why, last time he had heard about it they were still conducting experiments on volunteers who got paid to sit down and write to each other under observation.  
No names, no descriptions, and no addresses meant people still had to go out there and put themselves on the line, falling in love and possibly getting hurt when they were to find out their lover was not their soulmate.  
Not everybody cared, like his parents, but Lewis held on to the hope that his soulmate would want to meet and be with him since he had been ready to answer him.  
"Thanks. Have you been reading my messages for a long time?" he wrote down in a hurry.  
"Nine months."  
Lewis licked his lips, considering that meant his soulmate was born in his year, or maybe at the end of the previous one. Still, it sounded pretty good to him that there wasn't too much of an age difference.  
"Sorry for keeping you waiting," he wrote slowly. "Are you still single?"  
"Yes. You?"  
Lewis grinned at his arm, not even noticing how he was covering more and more of it with writing.  
"Me too. Waiting for the right one I guess."  
"Me too. So, what do you like?" Lewis replied with a smile, laying down on his bed once more, gaze fixed on his arm as he prepared himself for a long night spent getting to know his soulmate.

In the end his parents had a fit when they saw the writing all over his arms, some words even visible on his wrists, poking out under the cuffs. Since the words were still there it was clear that they couldn't have been left more than a few hours before, in the thick of night. But it wasn't like his parents could really stop him. His father was also mad at him for skipping the party, obviously, but Lewis didn't care about his harsh words for once, memory full of what his soulmate had told him, how they couldn't wait to meet him.

***

Lewis kept writing to his soulmate over the years, pouring himself into his words and greedily drinking everything his soulmate shared with him. For the first time in his life he had somebody that seemed genuinely happy to talk to him for hours on end.  
At least until Lewis left Yale, enlisted and entered the OCS.

Dick was everything Lewis had ever wanted without even knowing so. The man had no vices, so it was virtually impossible to convince him to actually follow Lewis to the bar in town whenever they were actually free. He wouldn't drink, wouldn't swear, wouldn't crack a joke about sex, but he was brilliant, kind, and for as much as they were opposites they simply fit together.  
Dick would give Lewis his undivided attention when he spoke and considered his words before voicing his opinion on any matter.  
After a life of being treated like a failure by his family and his professors, his soulmate the only dissonant voice in the choir, Lewis held on to their blossoming friendship and hoped with all of his heart when they parted ways after OCS that they would meet again.

They were reunited at Camp Toccoa few months after graduation and then trained together for less than a year before Lewis, with his heart lodged in his throat, decided to try and see if the best man he had ever met in person was actually his soulmate.  
He felt a bit like he was betraying his soulmate when he wrote on his own belly, "I think I know who you are, the usual bar in town Friday night after dinner?" but he simply had to know. It was driving him crazy, the friendship between him and Dick growing deeper day by day until he started actually wishing that Dick was in fact the man who left words on his skin.  
More than once he had wanted to show Dick - by mistake - and see his reaction, but it wasn't something people did. Words were so personal that they had been encouraged since the first days at Camp to hide them under their shirts if they just couldn't help themselves. Though Lewis wasn't really someone who cared for rules or taboos, he was afraid that Dick would see his words and just say something along the line of, "Well, they seem nice," instead of recognizing them for his own words.  
So he wrote the invitation and that Friday night he went to the bar the whole platoon would frequent in their free time. He waited for hours, his hope dying out with every minute that ticked by on the watch his father had gifted him when he had been accepted to Yale. He started ordering shot after shot, trying to not appear like he had been stood up. After all, the man he wanted to be there clearly had no idea and his soulmate hadn’t answered in hours, probably hurt by the implication that Lewis had a crush on somebody else.  
He staggered back to Camp and threw himself on his cot without even fully undressing, too drunk and hurt to care.

He plastered a half-smile on his lips when Dick went straight to him at the officers’ mess for breakfast. For once Dick didn't even notice how troubled Lewis felt, sighing softly as he started eating.  
"Man, I know I look bad, but you look like you didn't sleep an hour," Lewis considered, looking at him over his coffee.  
Dick huffed, throwing him a glance before looking around to make sure nobody was really minding them. And that was enough for Lewis to know that he was either about to tell him something very private or something Sobel related.  
Lewis hated that man with a passion.  
"Sobel made us run for hours. Well into the night." Dick rolled his eyes before biting down into his breakfast.  
Lewis nodded sympathetically. A little whisper in his mind tried telling him that if that was the case Dick might not have seen a hypothetical note from his soulmate, busy as he was, but he smothered that voice ruthlessly.  
He had tried, had suffered for it, and wasn't going to endanger what he had with his soulmate just because he had hoped that his soulmate and Dick might be the same person.

"Will you forgive me?" He wrote on his belly where his invitation had faded sometime the night before while he was passed out on his cot.  
The answer came shortly after: "Whatever you did, it's okay. I don't think I could ever hold something against you for long anyway".  
Lewis pressed his lips in a tight line, a bit overwhelmed at finding his soulmate still so good with him, always so ready to see the best in him. He still couldn't take his mind off the wish that it was Dick, but he reasoned that maybe it was just because he couldn't help wishing he had met his soulmate already.

***

“Has your soulmate been drafted?”  
It was a cruel thing to ask, especially in a place as bleak as Bastogne, and as soon as the words escaped his mouth Lewis regretted them. There was a curl of sorrow and bitterness in the pit of his stomach and he shook his head, deeply sorry and not daring to look at Dick, suddenly tense beside him.  
“‘m sorry,” he mumbled. “Shouldn’t have-”  
“I don’t think so,” Dick whispered softly, his voice muffled a bit by the chattering of his teeth.  
They didn’t look at each other, not really sure what else there was to say.  
Lewis was determined not to be the first to talk after the stupid question he had asked without thinking.  
He and Dick were sitting in a foxhole, pressed together under a blanket in a desperate attempt to store some heat. They had not been able to correspond with their soulmates in days, too cold to even think about removing the many layers of clothes even for just a moment.  
Lewis felt like shit, dragging up such a subject in those desperate hours only because he had not been able to let go of a long-lasting crush on his best friend. He didn’t think he was ever going to get over it, not until he finally met his soulmate.  
“I tried writing something I thought they would recognize if they were who I thought they were,” Dick confessed after some minutes of silence.  
Lewis threw a glance at him, pressing his lips into a tight line. “No luck?” He asked softly, fully knowing how painful that could be.  
Dick pressed his lips and nodded his head, eyes downcast as he thought back on that moment. “They asked me what it was.”  
“Maybe it was too specific and it got smudged up?” As often as Lewis had to ask that same question after something appeared smudged up on his skin, he wouldn’t have ruled out Dick’s soulmate simply being unable to read his message. But he also understood the desire to drop a subject when your soulmate didn’t respond to it and he didn’t want to press Dick on the matter too much.  
“Hardly.” Dick shook his head, swallowing and trying to shuffle under the blanket a bit more.  
Lewis acted before he could stop and think twice about it: he moved one arm around his friend’s shoulders and tugged him closer, so Dick was leaning against him.  
Dick tensed up for a short moment, but then went willingly, the raise of his chest hinting at a sigh as he made himself comfortable against Lewis’ shoulder.  
“I don’t think mine is either,” Lewis admitted softly. “Kind of happy about it though, when it means spending weeks in a frozen hell.”

Dick was dozing off when Lewis shuffled under the tarp covering the foxhole they had been sharing lately, and he stopped when Dick sat up with a start, pulling his side-arm at him.  
In the dim light Lewis raised his hands, still half in and half out of the foxhole.  
“Just me and my innocent flask.”  
Dick drew a breath and finally lowered his gun. Lewis relaxed as the fear of getting shot receded and took a deep breath himself before busying himself with fixing the tarp over their heads as Dick put back his gun.  
They made quick work with the blanket, covering themselves with practiced ease, but before Dick could doze off once more Lewis nudged him with his elbow.  
“News from HQ?” Dick asked, looking suddenly more aware.  
“Same old, same old. Hold the line, fill the gaps with I don’t know what.” Lewis shrugged, but then took out of his pocket two chocolate bars.  
“Where did you find those?” Dick looked on with eyes wide, surprise written on his face while Lewis gloated.  
“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” he joked, and both of them chuckled.  
Dick hesitated for a moment before taking the bars Lewis was still offering him.   
“Merry Christmas, Dick.”  
Dick’s eyes snapped to his, shock giving way to a warm expression that always made Lewis’ heart do strange things.  
“Merry Christmas, Lew.”  
Of course Lewis would never tell him that maybe a part of him had decided to give him both the chocolate bars precisely because he knew Dick would insist on sharing them and so he wasn’t going to really go without.

Dick broke the chocolate in pieces, offering him a big chunk of it, but when it became clear that Lewis’ struggle against his gloves would not be over quickly, he simply pushed it between Lewis’ lips.  
Lewis froze for a moment, surprised, but he stopped fighting his gloves and accepted the chocolate, content to watch Dick enjoy his gift as both of them let the chocolate melt slowly in their mouths.  
In the end he put his hands under his armpits even with his gloves still on to keep them a little more warm and, after a glance full of confusion, Dick had simply rolled his eyes and kept up with his breaking off the chocolate and feeding a piece to his friend before eating his own part.  
If Lewis couldn’t stop smiling, Dick didn’t mention it.  
If Lewis ignored the feeling of guilt rolling in his stomach at the thought that this felt a bit like cheating on his soulmate, no one else had to know.

Lewis had no idea how they actually ended up kissing.  
Maybe they had shared too small a space for too long, huddling under the same blanket, pressed together from foot to shoulder. Too many times to count he had tugged Dick until the man was pressed a bit more snugly against him, his red hair gently tickling his cheek.  
The only times Lewis could relax a bit were when Dick slept against him, assured that at least he wouldn’t be blown to pieces while Lewis wasn’t around.  
He had finished his reserve of alcohol sometime in the previous days, the nurses in Bastogne hogging all of it for the injured soldiers. Lewis might have liked the burn and temporary warmth the liquor would give him, but he was no asshole and left it to those who needed it more.  
When Lewis' hands began to shake a bit too much Dick had taken from his pocket the one chocolate bar that had survived the night, and Lewis had closed his eyes, too tired to pretend he wasn’t hoping Dick would feed him again. Lewis couldn't help but take Dick's hand in his own - to get to the chocolate better, he could have lied, but Dick was looking at him with his bright blue eyes and Lewis had never been really good at lying to his face. Or even thinking about lying to his face, apparently.  
The first press of a kiss was chaste, a bit stilted as neither of them was sure the other would actually welcome it, or how they would react after. To the first kiss followed a second though, and then another, and as their confidence grew they started pressing against each other, the chocolate forgotten.  
Lewis barely noticed when he sneaked one arm around Dick's shoulders, the same way he always did, and tilted his head to reach Dick’s mouth better. He licked at the seam of Dick’s lips, hoping to not push the man away, but Dick parted them right away, a soft sigh escaping him as Lewis held him tight and kissed him slowly.  
They kept silent during the whole thing, trying to grab at each other and kiss without letting anyone know what they were actually doing in their foxhole. It was the warmest Lewis had felt in days, his blood rushing in his ears, and Lewis would have given all his money to just be able to stay in that moment for hours.  
For the first time in months he didn't feel alone, the desperation of the war around him briefly forgotten.

He was afraid of what Dick might say after, but the man kept silent, simply looking into Lewis’ eyes for the longest time before he leaned in with his eyes closed and pressed his forehead against Lewis' jawline. Lewis sighed deeply, trailing his fingers through those few centimeters of red hair not covered with either helmet or scarf. They stayed like that for what felt like half an hour before Dick lifted his head.  
When they met each other's gaze Lewis knew he had to say something, even if he was afraid of losing his best friend, and maybe the man he loved.  
"Would this be so bad?" he murmured, slowly tracing Dick’s bottom lip with his thumb.  
Dick stood still for a moment before slowly shaking his head, his eyes searching Lewis' for something.  
Lewis figured Dick had found whatever it was he was looking for because the next thing he knew Dick was kissing him again, while Lewis did his best to wrap his arms around Dick and hold on.  
He only hoped his soulmate would forgive him one day.

***

There was something depressing about knowing you were in love with somebody that wasn't your soulmate, made more so by the certainty that the other half of your soul was out there somewhere waiting for you.  
Lewis swallowed the lump in his throat, sitting on the little bed the nuns had left them. He sighed deeply, fully aware that Dick wasn't the only person he was unable to lie to, and grabbed his pen from his pocket. He pulled up his clothes, baring his tummy for the first time in weeks, and wrote to his soulmate.  
"You deserve somebody better than me."  
It killed him a bit to do so, but he knew it was only right to give them a fair warning.  
He shivered when words started appearing right away under his own.  
"Why do you say that? Maybe I'm the one who doesn’t deserve you."  
Lewis snorted softly, shaking his head. Typical of his soulmate. Always ready to see the best in him even when Lewis couldn't find a piece of good.  
"I kissed another man. Felt alone, and I’ve loved him for years." He wrote slowly, a lump in his throat that wouldn't go away no matter how much he swallowed around it, but it was the truth.  
He knew there was a chance his soulmate could tell him to go to hell, or that the next day Dick would find his own soulmate and be the one to step away from him, and Lewis wouldn't have faulted either of them for it.  
Still, he had not lied to his soulmate for nine years and didn't want to start anytime soon. Maybe they would at least keep writing to him even if they went on with their life without him.  
He was startled by a sudden pounding at his door and he instinctively put one hand to his side arm just as the door was thrown open. He drew a deep breath upon recognizing Dick, but the relief didn't last long.  
Dick was looking at him, bewildered, jacket not properly buttoned up, and after one single second of staring at each other he turned around.  
Lewis almost expected him to leave, but Dick only closed the door before turning once more to him.  
"What's-" He stopped, blinking hard when Dick started unbuttoning his jacket in a hurry.  
Upon seeing how his long, pale fingers were shaking, Lewis started to grow concerned and rose from the bed.  
"Dick?"  
The other man didn't answer, yanking his shirt up to reveal his stomach, looking straight at Lewis the whole time.  
Lewis sat down hard, too shocked to be able to do much more than bring a hand up to his lips.  
"Lew?"  
Dick's voice snapped him out of his thoughts and Lewis hurried into action, a grin splitting his face as he looked up at Dick and hiked up his own clothes, showing him the same words Dick had on his skin.  
A laugh bubbled up in Lewis’ chest and Dick smiled back, relief and joy lighting up his whole face.

It was just a second before Dick took Lewis' face between his hands, pressing their mouths together. Lewis returned the kiss in kind, his fingertips relentlessly moving in Dick’s short red hair as he leaned back and tried pulling the man down on top of him in the process. Not that Dick seemed about to protest, chuckling over his lips and trying to keep kissing him.  
They ended up sprawled over the bed together, mostly one on top of the other for lack of space and because they couldn't bring themselves to move away from each other.  
"Can't believe it took us more than nine years," Dick whispered slowly caressing the line of Lewis' jaw.  
"Can't believe you're still not running for the hills." Lewis snorted with crooked smile.  
Dick rolled his eyes but pressed one more kiss to his soulmate's lips, and Lewis decided to stop pointing out that option still existed, focusing instead on keeping the man by his side.


End file.
